Newport International Film Festival 2008

In the sweltering summer of 1994, Rudy Giuliani is in his clean city crusade, hip-hop is permeating white youth culture, and a pot-dealing loser kid, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), is trying to figure out how to solve his parents’ insolvency, beat depression, and get laid before pushing off to college. Luckily he’s got a nifty deal with a psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), who trades him therapy sessions for weed. It happens that the oddball doctor’s marriage is crumbling, so the two—one in late adolescence, the other in late middle-age—embark on messy passages into new life stages. As Luke falls for a classmate (Olivia Thirlby) who just happens to be Squires’s daughter, the summer heats up, and he follows doctor’s orders, learning to coexist with pain and make it part of him, rather than let it become his downfall. Famke Janssen, Mary Kate Olsen and Method Man round out the cast in this edgy, bittersweet, and funny coming of age story. (Winner Sundance Audience Award- 2008)